Joseph Le Bon

File:Joseph Le Bon - estampe.jpg

Joseph Le Bon

File:JosephLeBonSignature.jpg

Joseph Le Bon signature

Joseph Le Bon (29 September 1765 – 10 October 1795) was a French revolutionary.

Biography

He was born at Arras, the son of a city sergeant of the Aldermen of Arras, he belongs to a family of nine children on the verge of poverty. He was a student of the |Oratorians in Arras, then in Juilly, and without much conviction, he decided to become a priest and left for Paris in 1783 to make his novitiate. He entered the Oratory congregation in 1784 and was appointed to the college of Beaune, where he proved to be an excellent teacher of rhetoric. His companions nicknamed him the "Well-named". In December 1789, Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, ordained him as a priest.

On May 5, 1790, his students having escaped to attend the Festival of the Federation in Dijon, Le Bon was reprimanded by his superiors; he ran after his students in a car, brought them back to the college, but at that moment tore his clothes and declared that he was leaving the congregation. When he returned the next day, they refused to take him back.

He then moved to Ciel, near Beauvais, and lived at the home of the father of one of his students. There, on June 8, 1791, he received the news of his nomination as constitutional priest of Neuville-Vitasse (Pas-de-Calais) and Le Vernois, near Beaune. At first he opted for Le Vernois, but, learning that his mother had gone mad at the news that he had taken the constitutional oath, he accepted Neuville-Vitasse, to be closer to his family.

After August 10, 1792, having just renounced the priesthood, he was elected second substitute for Pas-de-Calais at the National Convention on September 9, with 400 votes out of 609 voters, mayor of Arras on September 14 and administrator of the department. He had the commissioners of the Paris Commune, sent to explain and justify the decisions taken after August 10, arrested and expelled from Arras, and Guffroy reported him as a suspect of moderantism. His fellow citizens showed their confidence in him by appointing him as the procurator-syndic of the department on October 20. However, the departmental assembly, reluctant to accept his abjuration, soon ousted him from this last position. In December, a new general council was elected in Arras, headed by Nicolas François Hacot. Le Bon then left his position as mayor for that of member of the Directory. On November 5, 1792, he married his first cousin, Élisabeth Regniez, from Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise.

For a time, during the autumn and winter of 1792–1793, he was close to the views of the Girondins, with whom he shared the opposition to the trial of Louis XVI and the rejection of Marat, and he welcomed their fall during the insurrection of 1793.

On July 1, 1793, he was admitted to the Convention, replacing Magniez, and sat with the Mountain. He was first sent on a mission to the Somme and the Oise on August 9, 1793, with André Dumont, to fight against the hoarders in order to ensure the supply of the armies. Back in Paris, he was elected, on September 14, to the Committee of General Security, where he was, with Le Bas, one of Robespierre's loyalists. Bernard de Saintes denounced him as a federalist for having defended the members of the general council of the commune of Beaune against this representative, who was on a mission in the Côte-d'Or.

He refused a mission in the Orne, because of his wife's health. On October 29, he was sent to the Pas-de-Calais, where he opposed the attempts of the sans-culottes inspired by the Hébertists, fought against monopolization, organized the requisition of food and hunted down refractory priests and deserters. However, he was moderate enough for Guffroy to accuse him of lukewarmness and present him to the Convention as the protector of counter-revolutionaries. On March 6, 1794, the Committee of Public Safety recalled him, before sending him back, with the same powers, to the same department.

Carried away by the revolutionary fever, while the enemy was only a few leagues from Arras, he began to crack down on the royalists and applied with the utmost rigor the national measures: the Law of Suspects, law of General Maximum, reorganization of the surveillance committee of Arras. In February 1794, he obtained the institutionalization of the revolutionary tribunal, which sat in Arras and then in Cambrai until July 10; he personally oversaw the composition of the juries and intervened during trials.

Guffroy denounced him again, this time as an extremist revolutionary, but the lack of probity of the accuser prevented his approach from obtaining sufficient echo in Paris. At the origin of these accusations, one finds the public accuser of Arras, Demuliez, who, suspected by Le Bon of secret intelligences with the Counter-revolution, was arrested and led to Paris. Demuliez was assisted by his friend Guffroy, who wrote a pamphlet entitled The Secrets of Joseph le Bon and his accomplices, second republican censorship, or Letter of A.-B.-J. Guffroy, Representative of the People, Deputy to the Convention, by the Department of Pas-de-Calais, to the National Convention and to the Public Opinion. Supporting documents.

However, when Guffroy brought his attacks against Le Bon to the tribune, on July 25, 1794, the matter was referred to the Committee of Public Safety for examination, and Barère, in a report presented a few days later, rejected the denunciation. Especially since Le Bon had distinguished himself by his energetic conduct in the face of the Austrians, who were threatening Cambrai. Called to this city by Saint-Just and Le Bas, Le Bon helped preparations for the Battle of Fleurus. At the end of the Terror, there were more than 1,000 prisoners and more than 300 convicts in Pas-de-Calais.

But on 15 Thermidor II (2 August 1794), a few days after the fall of Robespierre, new denunciations against Le Bon led this time to a decree of accusation. Recalled to Paris, he was arrested. On 18 Floréal (7 May 1795), the Assembly charged a commission of 21 members to examine his conduct. Quirot, the reporter, presented the conclusions of his investigation on 1 messidor year III (June 19, 1795). He divided into four classes the facts imputed to Le Bon (1° legal assassinations, 2° oppression of the citizens in mass, 3° exercise of personal vengeance, 4° robberies and dilapidations) and concluded with the indictment.

Admitted to the stand to justify himself, Le Bon claimed three baskets of papers that had been taken from his home and seized by his enemies. After several weeks spent hearing his defense, as the procedure dragged on, it was decided that Quirot would read his report article by article and that the accused would answer in the same order. Le Bon denied most of the facts of which he was accused and mitigated others. His defense was especially centered on the fact that he only carried out the decrees of the Convention. For the fourth charge (theft and squandering), the Assembly refused to hear the rest of the report, declaring that Le Bon had fully justified himself in this regard.

He was nevertheless brought before the criminal court of Amiens. During his fourteen months of detention, he wrote to his wife a series of letters which were collected and published in 1815 by his son Émile Le Bon, an magistrate in Chalon-sur-Saône. Condemned to death on October 11, 1795 for abuse of power during his mission, he was executed in Amiens on 24 Vendemiaire year IV (October 16, 1795). The criminal court judged without appeal, according to the law of prairial 12. In vain Le Bon asked to benefit from the new constitution and to appeal in cassation; the Convention moved on with the agenda.

For more than a century, the image of Joseph Le Bon gave rise to a real ideological conflict, marked by political debates at the local level. While the right identified him with a bloodthirsty proconsul, for the left, he embodied a Republic that distributed cheap bread and political office to lowly activists.

Victims

During his stay in the north he chased many nobles, most of them condemned for treason and executed by guillotine

• François III Maximilien de la Woestyne, 3rd Marquess of Becelaere
• Charles Oudart, Marquess of Courronnel de Barastre
• Benoit Louis Lallart de Berlette
• Therese Dufour
• the Count of Bethune-Penin
• Laurence-Joseph-Amélie Lallart de Berles,
• Eleonore Julie de Duglas, wife of the marquis de Berthoult de Hauteclocque
• Auguste Joseph, Count of Mailly d'Haucourt
• Francois Valerien Caneau du Roteleur
• Pierre Antoine Boniface
• Charles-André Buchold dit Bucholtz, general
• Ignace Godefroy de Lannoy, 4th count of Beaurepaire
• Angelo Ghislain de Beaulaincourt, Count of Marles
• Henri, Baron of Wasservas d'Haplincourt
• Louis Ignace le Sergeant d'Hendecourt
• Lamoral Eugene, Baron of Aix de Remy

References

• Joseph F. Byrnes, Priests of the French Revolution: Saints and Renegades in a New Political Era. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press (2014).
• Yves Dhotel, Joseph Le Bon: ou, Arras sous la Terreur: Essai sur la Psychose Révolutionnaire. Paris: Éditions Hippocrate (1934).
• Ivan Gobry, Joseph Le Bon: La Terreur dans le Nord de la France. Paris: Mercure de France (1991).
• Patrice Hennessy, "La Première Mission de Joseph Le Bon, Août 1793", Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, Vol. III, No. 15 ‎(1926).
• Louis Jacob, Joseph le Bon (1765-1795). La Terreur à la frontière (Nord et Pas-de-Calais). Paris & Châteauroux: Imprimeur-éditeur Mellottée (1934).
• Albert Mathiez, "Robespierre et Joseph Le Bon," Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, Vol. I, No. 1 (1924).
• Auguste Paris, Histoire de Joseph le Bon et des tribunaux révolutionnaires d'Arras et de Cambrai: la Terreur dans le Pas-de-Calais et dans le Nord. Arras: Imprimerie de la Société du Pas-de-Calais (1879).
• Ronen Steinberg, "Terror on Trial: Accountability, Transitional Justice, and the Affaire Le Bon in Thermidorian France", French Historical Studies, Vol. XXXIX, No 3 (2016).
• Ronen Steinberg, The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France. Ithaca/Londres: Cornell University Press (2019).
• Louis de Viel-Castel, "Le Fanatisme Politique: Joseph Le Bon," Revue des Deux Mondes, Vol. XLIII, No. 2 (1863).
• Charles Whibley, "Joseph Le Bon," Strand Magazine, Vol. LI (1916).

External links

• Works by Joseph Le Bon at Gallica